The Joy of Exploration in Modern WoW

One of the things I love about the vanilla World is how utterly explorable it is. You've got these huge land masses full of interesting things to discover everywhere, and even after years of playing that version of the game, I have no doubt that there are still some quests and hidden surprises that I've never come across. The sense of wonder this created was amazing.

Sadly, this is also something that kind of fell by the wayside in the expansions that followed. The artists still created beautiful environments, but you weren't really meant to spend much time in them; they were increasingly just a backdrop for the quests you rushed through on your way to the level cap. Just today I did a few low-level Cata quests on an alt, and while mining an ore node, I accidentally got into combat with an elite. It was surprisingly powerful and took me a while to whittle down... just to then drop nothing, and not even give XP, presumably because it only exists to be blown up with a quest item in one specific quest.

Fortunately Blizzard has backtracked on this in recent years, and both Dragonflight and War Within are full of all kinds of neat things to find if you only allow yourself to look. Sure, you can never be that same wide-eyed newbie again, but there are still new vistas to marvel at and fun secrets to discover.

On that subject, I just wanted to share a couple of YouTube videos I saw recently and that really resonated with me. First we have small YouTuber ButchX3's series about playing World of Warcraft for the first time.

The first part with the title "I played World of Warcraft for the first time EVER" showed up on my YouTube feed when it came out, but I've got to admit I ignored it at first. The thumbnail hinted at him having difficulties, and I figured I'd seen enough videos of people struggling to figure out basic mechanics or not understanding the story recently.

But then part two showed up, with the title "FIRST TIME Player Discovers the SECRET of World of Warcraft", with a thumbnail of him gaping in awe at a purple flower in his hand, at which point I was like "fine, I'll click, let's see what a new player considers the secret of WoW". And I was not only surprised, but positively enchanted. The purple flower in the thumbnail even turned out to be relevant! I immediately went back to watch part one afterwards, and found that there was a third part as well.

In a nutshell, he started by playing through Exile's Reach and had a fun time, but once Azeroth fully opened up to him, he forgot all about questing and got completely distracted by other players and the sheer size of the map, embarking on an epic adventure to immediately travel as far as the game would let him, which he conveys with appropriate excitement and sense of grandeur.

He got a lot of help from newcomer chat as well, which really impressed me, as until now this was a feature that I was vaguely aware of but hadn't really given much thought. I felt inspired to sign up as a guide myself after that. I wonder if there'll be any more installments in this series, now that he's explored the world in all three dimensions.

The other video that showed up in my feed one day and really surprised me was "DragonNoFlight: A love letter to ground travel" by tiny YouTuber FaroraSF, which caught my eye with both its title and the lovingly hand-drawn thumbnail.

Unlike Butch, Farora is an old hand at the game, but clearly loves to explore. In this nearly two-hour long video, she decided to randomly quest through Dragonflight without flying, documenting along the way the kinds of challenges she'd come across. Spoiler: For an expansion all about flying, the Dragon Isles turned out to be surprisingly accessible on foot!

At various intervals, she takes a break from her current adventures to look back on older versions of the game, going over fond memories and analysing different expansions' zone designs. I found this really eye-opening, as she points out a lot of things that I'd kind of noticed sub-consciously but had never really thought about myself.

Finally, she also made a shorter sequel about exploring War Within without flying. Seriously, the way she did that quest with the pipes!

Anyway, I just really wanted to give these two creators a shout-out as examples to show that modern WoW still has room for exploration and a sense of wonder as well, and because I found all their videos thoroughly enjoyable.

WoW Memories #2: October 21st, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time. Since there was never an intent to have these posts be read by a wider audience, a lot of things will be lacking context (which would have been obvious to me and my friends at the time) so I'm adding footnotes to make things clearer, and to judge my past self's choices.

The following was originally posted on October 21th, 2006 under the title "More WoW Fun":

Ah, the bizarreness of the human condition.

Yesterday I logged on one more time to see how many Germans would be online in the middle of the night.¹ Unsurprisingly the place was pretty dead. Except that I ended up running right into the middle of a commotion.

As it turned out Goldhain², the village next to the starting grounds, was suffering a two-(or-three)-man invasion by an Orc huntress and her pet lion and some other Horde guy I couldn't identify.³ He had a staff and made himself invisible a lot.⁴ Now, they couldn't actually attack any players without being attacked first, so they started slaughtering NPCs instead, which caused a lot of "OMG, the village is under attack" messages to pop up in the chat.

A few brave souls actually ventured forward and tried to take them on, but they were killed almost instantly. It was really sad. After that everyone else made sure to not attack the Horde players anymore, but they kept following them around, jumping up and down and yelling for help. I thought it was quite sad and funny at the same time.

I guess that was the revenge for everyone making fun of the Orc corpse that lay on the town square all day long.⁵

¹ As a reminder, I was still living in Austria back then, bought the game in German, and rolled my first character on a German server.

² Goldhain is the German name for Goldshire. I was using the German client and while I was writing about the game in English, I didn't immediately realise that some places had different names in German and English.

³ I think it's interesting that even though I rolled on a PvE server and had no interest in PvP at the time, literally the second post I wrote about the game was about an instance of world PvP. In the starting zone. People are not exaggerating when they say that it was happening everywhere back then.

⁴ The only class that would fit that description would be druid, but then I'm thinking that if it had been that, I would have made note of the giant bloody minotaur instead of "a Horde guy with a staff"? I think it's more likely that it was something like an undead mage or warlock whom I simply struggled to keep track of.

⁵ That last sentence is fascinating to me simply because the notion that a dead orc in town would keep general chat talking all day is kind of incomprehensible to me nowadays, but I guess those were different times and it took a lot less to get everyone excited and chatting.

Delve Week

I mentioned a few weeks ago that delves weren't off to the best start with me, or I with them. After I wrote that post, I did a few more delves on low tiers on levelling alts, for whom they really were the advertised fun 15-minute romps, but otherwise I mostly stayed away unless the husband needed help with a tier eight on his mage. Some things you just don't get to say no to.

More generally speaking though, I continued to feel vaguely annoyed by delves and didn't want to bother with them. For some people they may be the greatest new feature ever, but I figured Blizz couldn't pay me enough to put up with them. Except... maybe they could.

Which is to say that this past week was "delve week". Not only were rewards from delves increased for seven days (as if they needed to be any more rewarding than they already were!), there were also not one but two weekly quests available for max-level characters in Dornogal to complete multiple delves. I know I didn't have to do those, but I really like ticking off my weeklies... fine, Blizzard, I'll play your game.

With four characters at level 80 by this point, I was potentially looking at twenty delves or more, so I knew I needed help. I searched for advice and found this video by SignsOfKelani particularly helpful. The "use your utility" section was what stood out to me the most. Careful pulling? Using crowd control? That sounds like heroic dungeons back in Burning Crusade and I used to like those! Maybe I just needed to let go of this notion that because Blizzard promoted delves as this quick and easy activity, that's what they were actually meant to be. I mean, I guess they could be if you were sufficiently overgeared or doing them at a low enough tier, but if you were actually trying to use them to gear up, they were something else. Maybe it was just a matter of accepting and embracing that.

I decided to make my holy priest my dedicated solo character for this purpose and started with a round of Fungal Folly, since I'd heard that the exploding spores in there actually do damage to the enemies as well, something I hadn't originally realised. Soon my go-to strategy became to simply aggro everything on a given platform, including all the spores, and then run screaming in hopes of making it out before they exploded. It worked surprisingly well and was - dare I say it - strangely fun.

In Kriegval's Rest, I progressed one tiny step at a time, using mind control to make the mobs beat each other up from a distance so I had fewer of them left to finish off at the end. I actually used abilities like Mind Soothe and Psychic Scream, which I hadn't really found a use for in forever. Without exploding spores to help with the dps, killing things took a really long time (I sadly had to find out that many of the mind-controlled mobs' abilities gave the error "target not a player" when I tried to turn them against each other), but I did get there in the end.

I had absolutely hated my last experience in an underwater delve, so that was next on my list of fears to face down. I made sure to grab some underwater breathing potions this time to get rid of the constant pressure of drowning and that immediately helped a lot. In the middle of a pull featuring more mind-control, Zekvir breached the delve and I had barely time to go "oh no" before he swatted me. Weirdly enough the fight didn't reset though, probably because I went into Spirit of Redemption form and had the talent that brings me back to life for free once every ten minutes. When I got up again, blinking in confusion, Brann was still fighting so I joined in, and with a lot of frantic kiting and spam-healing, I managed to stay alive long enough for Brann's dps to push him back. Now that was satisfying.

People have very different attitudes to challenge in MMOs, or video games in general for that matter. Some don't really want to be pushed at all, desiring only relaxation from their gaming experience. Others want challenge and thrills as often as possible. I'm more in the "taking it easy" department myself nowadays, but there are definitely times when a game pushes me that I will push back. I'll always remember that time I spent something like half an hour fighting a beholder boss in Neverwinter just because he was standing between me and completion of a quest. This situation with delves has felt similar in that at first I was just put off, but somehow this week's event was the push needed to nudge me back into action and it actually felt satisfying to go back into delves and be successful.

It's also been a good opportunity to do more duoing with the husband. I mostly talked about the solo challenge so far, but we also did more delves together. The main lesson we took away from this is that one person just has to be on a sturdy character that has the cooldowns to stand still and take some hits. When we tried the Underkeep as an evoker/mage duo it was just a disaster because we were both too squishy. Sure, sometimes you can kite, but sometimes you can't, and then you're stuck. In this instance we'd got the variant of that delve that requires you to defeat a row of ambushes within a small circular area, and there just wasn't enough room to make kiting work, and neither of us could survive getting hit more than a couple of times. After losing all our lives, we went out and redid it twice as evoker/death knight and mage/warrior instead and both of those were a breeze. In fact, that was the first time we did complete a tier eight delve in the advertised fifteen minutes, because with the right combination of classes it was just a whole different game.

Warrior and mage taking a break at the campfire after surviving an ambush in the Underkeep

I guess the point of all this rambling is that you only get to make a first impression once, but sometimes a second look does change things. I'm glad I gave delves another try because approaching them with a different mindset made a huge difference to my enjoyment. That said, I'm not planning to suddenly start running them by the dozen like I did last week. They are still time-consuming, and (in my opinion!) overly rewarding to the point that they can feel like a chore that you must do because the rewards are too good to pass up. 

This past weekend my guildies and I also stepped into Mythic Zero dungeons for the first time since the expansion launch, which was definitely the right choice based on the challenge level we encountered (which is to say we cleared them in decent time, but we did wipe and generally die more than a few times, showing that we weren't really ready for M+ yet), but most of us got no gear rewards out of the exercise since all the item drops were about ten item levels lower than what people already had.

WoW Memories #1: October 20th, 2006

As mentioned about a month ago, I'd like to celebrate WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends back then. Since there was never an intent to have these posts be read by a wider audience, a lot of things will be lacking context (which would have been obvious to me and my friends at the time) so I'll be adding footnotes to make things clearer, and to judge my past self's choices.

The following was originally posted on October 20th, 2006 under the title "[My RL name] Goes WoW":

I saw the German version of Pets in a store here today.¹ For sixty Euros (a little more than seventy-five dollars). Hrglnglrgl. And people ask me why I prefer to buy my computer games abroad...² to be fair though, I then saw it in the store across the street for only half of that. Which in turn made me wonder what possessed the people in charge of the first store to think that sixty Euros would be a good price. Crazy.

I also got a completely different computer game in the post today³: World of Warcraft. I know I said I wouldn't⁴, but those were just the last fragments of denial from someone who was just too curious to resist the temptation any longer. Especially after I talked to Mechanichamster⁵, who's been playing for a while and assured me that it was all good fun.

Unfortunately he wasn't around today to give me any guidance, so I just started by creating a Human Paladin on a German server and ventured out on my own.

This is Isadora.⁶ She's even decently dressed and everything!⁷ Though I'm sure I'll end up finding some more revealinguseful armour soon enough.

Being a newbie was fun, starting from the moment that I entered the realm and was hopelessly confused because I couldn't see myself, having merged with a bunch of other characters that stood in exactly the same spot as me. A lot of exploring, general stupidity and annoying death followed. And I almost laughed myself silly when I found the corpse of "Dumbledore" in the forest.⁸ I can kind of see why people find this addictive, because the world is huge, and as you enter it for the first time it seems as if the possibilities must be endless.

Still, I think that all on your own it's bound to become a bit boring after a while, especially with all the running around you end up doing as you level up. I haven't really interacted with any other players yet beyond helping each other out at defeating the occasional monster, and I'm a bit worried about making a fool out of myself due to my noobishness. I haven't even figured out how to make my character wield anything but that giant hammer thing yet, and I'd really like her to have a different weapon. Not that there's anything wrong with it in terms of functionality, but there's just something very ungraceful about clubbing wolves to death with a giant mallet.⁹

If any of you've been secretly playing WoW already, feel free to let me know - or if you've been thinking about giving the game a try but haven't yet, now would be just the perfect time to keep me company! *looks at Nemi...*¹⁰

¹ This is in reference to the Sims 2 expansion of that name. Before WoW, Sims 2 was my gaming addiction for a couple of years. While a single-player game, it had a very active community around things like custom content, storytelling and community challenges, which meant that I was always sharing how things were going for my Sims and talking to other people about it.

² Funny to see me complaining about video game prices back in 2006. To be fair, sixty Euros was a lot more back then that it is now.

³ It feels kind of weird that even the mere notion of receiving a new PC game in the post seems incredibly quaint and outdated already.

⁴ This linked to a post I had made about two weeks earlier, in which I expressed interest in the subject of MMOs after seeing a lot of friends and acquaintances talk about WoW, though I noted at the time that "I wouldn't trust myself with something as addictive as an MMORPG" - girl, you had no idea.

⁵ Mechanichamster, also referred to as Mecha or Matje later, was the first friend I ever made online, about four or five years prior to writing the original version of this post. We met on a message board about the Transformers cartoon from the 80s and actually ended up meeting in real life in the Netherlands (where he lived) too.

⁶ I actually posted this screenshot on this blog before, in this post from 2014, in which I answered some questions about my early/formative years in the game.

⁷ In hindsight, I'm not sure why I was so surprised that my character got to wear "decent" armour. I think my image of fantasy worlds at the time was still strongly influenced by the kind of materials I had found in my older brother's room while investigating the subject... which tended to feature very skimpily dressed barbarian ladies.

⁸ I was easily amused back then. I still am now, but that example seems like a low bar even by my standards. Then again, Harry Potter was actually super relevant back then, as we were still all anticipating the release of Deathly Hallows.

⁹ Fun fact: I tend to prefer swords to maces to this day.

¹⁰ My friend Nemi responded to the post with: "I'll install it tomorrow."

These Pugs Be Crazy

As much fun as I've been having in War Within over the past month, one thing I carefully avoided for the longest time was the random dungeon finder. I wrote a post earlier in the year about how WoW's random dungeon experience is terrible, and early indications from reddit pointed towards things only having gotten worse with the expansion. It made sense to me too, seeing how the introduction of follower dungeons meant that people who don't want to be harried or berated by strangers could now opt out of that experience while still seeing the content, further increasing the relative percentage of rushers and toxic players in LFD.

So for the first month or so, I strictly stuck to doing dungeons with the NPCs or in guild groups. However, in the past week my resolve started to weaken a bit. My priest needed a couple more levels and random dungeons started to look appealing as both a source of XP and as a way of practising my healing with the new priest toolkit. I'd had plenty of time to get to know all the dungeons on a basic level, and I figured that the sweatiest of the sweats would probably be in Mythic Plus or wherever by now, right? Right?

You can probably already tell that I ended up being wrong about that, at least to some degree. Basically, I ran about half a dozen normal mode pugs, and while they made for excellent healing practice, at least half the runs had someone in them who was acting insane. That is not a good percentage!

The very first dungeon I got into was Priory of the Sacred Flame with a monk tank. They pulled the entire courtyard to begin with and it felt like a minor miracle to me that nobody died, especially since I got silenced at some point. But okay, I'd consider that "normal" pug behaviour, even if unpleasant.

However, then they made a straight beeline for the first boss, which immediately made me go "uh oh". In case you don't know, the first boss in Priory is a bit like the second boss in Court of Stars in the sense that he gets buffed by lieutenants that you're supposed to draw away and kill separately first. He is however slightly less deadly than his Court of Stars counterpart, meaning that I'm told it's technically possible to kill him without taking out the lieutenants first, as long as your group has a perfect interrupt rotation. Which a normal pug obviously wasn't going to have.

Unsurprisingly, we got AoEd to death within a few seconds, which then resulted in the tank saying something along the lines of "you guys have no clue how to interrupt, good luck" and dropping group. I was only annoyed because I really wanted to tell them "What in the world did you think was going to happen?" The replacement tank we got did the fight the intended way and we had no further issues for the rest of the run.

Insanity of a different kind - but also displayed by a tank - was something I encountered in the Rookery. This tank was a death knight and level 71, when the scaling is most in your favour and you should be a god among men. However, for some reason this tank felt like they were made of paper and it was a real struggle to keep everyone alive, especially as the tank decided to go for massive pulls regardless.

Still, healing practice, right? At some point I opened Recount just to get an idea of how the numbers were looking, and I noticed that the tank was at the bottom of the damage done chart, having done less than half of the damage I had done as a healer (and that was with me not having had much time to add dps since everyone was constantly on the brink of death). I really have no clue what this person was doing.

Considering that every pull was a life or death battle due to the tank's disregard for their own or anyone else's health, I was worried about the bottom floor of the instance, as this is where the trash does a lot of AoE damage and can wipe you even if you were fine with bigger pulls up top. Naturally the paper tank tried to pull three groups at once and died. Somehow the dps had the sense to go into crazy kiting mode and it wasn't a full wipe, but it sure was intense. After we'd killed the last boss, one of the damage dealers put "please don't tank" into /say before leaving and I felt that.

However, the most impressive display of - to me - crazy behaviour happened in a Stonevault that actually seemed to be off to a good start initially. Sure, everyone was running and we were doing huge trash pulls as usual, but this death knight tank actually seemed to know what they were doing and things were much more controlled, with not that much damage hitting the party.

However, after the first boss a vote kick for the mage in the group suddenly popped up, with the given reason being either gibberish or a language I didn't understand. Naturally, I voted no. Moments later it came up again, this time with "puller". I voted no again, though I hadn't really seen what was happening. Everyone was ahead of me, I hadn't seen who had actually pulled, but there hadn't been that much damage going around either way, so it seemed fine?

The vote kicks kept popping up though, with different reasons. There should really be something to prevent you from trying to vote-kick the same person over and over if it keeps failing. The mage tried to kick the tank in turn at least once as well, but I voted no on that one too. We were fine! Why were people freaking out so much?!

This continued until after the second boss. On the trash to the third boss, the tank decided that they'd had enough and stopped tanking. This time I could see that the mage had indeed pulled, and naturally I had managed to get healing aggro already. The mage ran out of the instance portal and I had to do the same as the tank showed no interest in saving me from the mobs either. We both zoned back in once aggro had reset and rejoined the group at the third boss. Here the tank decided to... I don't even know what exactly they did, but it ended up wiping us, clearly on purpose. The mage gave up and quit, and people in chat were like "haha, finally". I was honestly just confused.

As we got a replacement and made our way to the last boss, the tank seemed surprised that I hadn't quit as well, and a conversation along the following lines ensued:

Tank: "Why didn't you kick the mage if you weren't together?"
Me: "Because I don't like kicking people over the tiniest things."
Tank: "Do you tank?"
Me: "Yes, I do."
Tank: "Don't you find it annoying too when dps pull for you?"
Me: "Yes, but I also find it annoying when tanks don't save me from healing aggro just cause they're annoyed with a dps."
Tank: "Who was annoying here first though?"
Me: "Here? To me? You were! But I didn't vote to kick you either."

Now, if you're someone who's very cynical about retail WoW, you might just chuck this up to retail being retail, lacking incentives to socialise etc., but the funny thing is, out in the open world I keep having great collaborative experiences and keep thinking how nice everyone is. It's just normal dungeons that have become this pocket of utter insanity.

I definitely find it worrying that so many of my runs were like this though. This wasn't one bad apple in a dozen runs, this was every other dungeon or worse. How are new players ever going to have a chance to experience grouping in a positive way like this? Friends and guilds are great, but I'm not sure people are going to stick around long enough to get to that point if their first grouping experiences are like this.

Nerub-ar Palace Solo Vs. LFR

I actually got one of those opinion surveys from Blizzard today. It wouldn't make for an exciting reddit exposé because the questions were all over the place (though the one that asked whether a MoP Classic would make me more likely to spend time in Classic was certainly something to take note of), but one subject it asked about in particular was something I've been meaning to write a post about anyway, namely how I felt about the new solo/story version of the Nerub-ar Palace raid.

WoW has long had a reputation for being both a solo player's game and yet all about raiding. I certainly think that both of those play styles can coexist peacefully, but as Blizzard has put more and more emphasis on storytelling, this dichotomy has certainly presented a bit of a problem: Over and over, you'd go through this whole intricate storyline by yourself just to have it end at the entrance to a raid, with nothing but a breadcrumb quest telling you to go do the raid now. By the time the next patch came around, it was on to the next storyline and solo players were largely left in the dark or confused about what had actually happened at the end of the raid.

The devs tried to alleviate this problem a little by adding an NPC after a few weeks that would let you watch the raid-end cut scene regardless, but that only worked to a limited extent. I thought Amirdrassil was a great example of this actually, as the story leading up to it ended with big baddie Fyrakk entering the raid and needing to be stopped, and then the cut scene you were allowed to watch afterwards was just a few seconds of the aspects looking surprised while their eyes glowed. I believe my initial response to this was something along the lines of: "What is even happening?" (I did eventually get more of a resolution through LFR, though that took more than one attempt as well.)

Being aware of this problem, Blizzard decided to try a new approach with The War Within's first raid by adding an actual story/solo mode. It's not the whole raid - only the last boss - and you won't get any loot out of it, but it should provide more context for what's going on. Naturally, as someone who's been following the in-game story through LFR for the last couple of expansions (or at least trying to), I was very interested in this.

So how does it work? A week after the raid opened for group play, a new quest appeared for solo players that had completed the campaign story, asking them to meet a contact in the City of Threads. He gives you a couple of tasks to help out people in the city, which culminate in a mission that tells you that the time has come to strike against the queen. Another NPC near the raid entrance "smuggles" you inside... along with nine friendly NPCs, the same ones that help out Horde and Alliance in the follower dungeons.

You then get to meet and fight Queen Ansurek in what I can only call a weak imitation of a raid fight, with some flashy mechanics going off that don't really seem to do anything and the NPCs mostly just forming a big pile. If you're a tank or a healer, the game doesn't even trust you to do the role you signed up for, as you'll be slotted in as the sixth dps regardless. But you do get a (very) vague idea of the fight and can watch the little cut scene at the end in peace. The reward for the quest also includes one of those rare crafting materials for a high-level item, which I actually used to place my first ever public crafting order for an epic belt.

I still wanted to see the whole thing in LFR too though - more than usual in fact, because while I'd appreciated the opportunity to see the story conclusion at my own pace, it did feel a bit "off" to me to just "sneak up" on the queen like that and face so little resistance. It made me go into LFR with a different attitude than usual, in the sense that I knew exactly how it was going to end this time, but I wanted to see more of how you're supposed to get there. Even if LFR fights are also mostly unorganised mayhem with extremely toned down mechanics, it does feel more epic with real people, and it's certainly possible to wipe.

I also found myself paying more attention to the bosses. I was happy to get a proper conclusion to the last fight of the Dawnbreaker dungeon for example (the boss runs away at the end and you don't get to take her down properly until the raid), and I found myself wondering just how the Ethereals will play into all this, as they were featured in the pre-expansion quest line and one of the bosses is a "Nexus Princess" who also makes an escape after you defeat her. These may be minor, but there are still story threads leading both into and out of the raid that you don't get to see in solo mode.

Overall I'll say the new story mode is a big improvement though. Its biggest weakness this time around was actually just the bad signposting. I was looking forward to checking it out, but I would not have known when or how to start it if a headline from Blizzard Watch hadn't caught my eye on my Bluesky timeline.

Blizzard is usually quite fond of just auto-granting you new story quests, but not only did they not do that with this one, it's also marked as a side quest - in an expansion with about a million of them. So unless you'd already cleared your map of all side quests before this one came out or used some sort of map filter, odds were high that you'd simply miss this new exclamation mark being added in town.

The other issue I had is that the WoW community is still absolutely atrocious about spoilers. The cut scene at the end of Nerub-ar Palace doesn't exactly contain any major plot points, but I still tripped over it left and right mere hours after solo mode was released and before I'd had a chance to see it in game for myself, as multiple YouTubers I watch used it as background footage for their videos while talking about something else. Like, come on, dudes. Is it that hard to show your viewers a little bit of courtesy by holding off on doing that kind of thing?

As far as Blizzard themselves go though, I think story mode is a good addition and didn't even turn me off LFR. I'm generally not a huge fan of LFR - I don't dislike it by any means but I also find it a bit tedious as a way of just seeing the end of the story, so I was wondering whether this new story mode would make LFR feel redundant to me. Surprisingly that hasn't been the case though - if anything, it kind of made me appreciate LFR more for what it is. Like a side quest to the final boss fight that I'm happy to check out, but I also appreciate that I don't have to do it to understand what's going on.

It's worth noting that the overall structure of the storyline also felt a bit different in this first tier of War Within than it usually does, as the raid is really more of a side story. Not to downplay Queen Ansurek's importance, but we know from the beginning that she's not the one in charge. The solo campaign also has a satisfying ending of its own (for the moment), so the pressure to go see the raid to understand how it all wraps up is actually lower than it would usually be at this point in an expansion. And I think that's a good thing as well.

What was your experience of the Nerub-ar Palace raid storyline?

Experimenting with Alts in War Within

I mentioned in a previous post that I wasn't sure what class I wanted to play as my main in War Within. Fortunately, the fact that I had one of each at level 70 by the time the expansion launched (largely thanks to MoP Remix and the Radiant Echoes event) meant that I had a lot of choice. One month in, I'm honestly still not sure which class I'd like to play more than any other, but I've had time to do a bit of exploring at least, as this expansion is very alt-friendly even if you're only playing on a relatively slow and casual level.

Preservation Evoker

For all the options I had, I still decided to go down the path of least resistance for my first character. She was my main in Dragonflight; it seemed easiest to just keep rolling along with her for now. Hopefully it shouldn't be too tough to switch focus to a different character later on if I feel like it.

She was the character on whom I did the main storyline, and the husband and I are still working our way through the side quests at a slower pace when there isn't anything else going on that takes priority in that moment.

The hero talent choices for Preservation Evoker are between Chronowarden (more bronze magic) and Flameshaper (more fire magic). I chose the former because it seemed more passive and I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to put extra abilities on her bar just for the sake of having more buttons to press, but it's honestly been kind of boring. I think it makes my Living Flame glow a bit differently? But other than that it really feels like a big nothingburger. In some ways that's a good thing since I was worried about hero talents adding too much additional complexity, but on the other hand it's also a little disappointing, especially since I've seen on some of my alts that these can be a lot more fun.

My evoker is also a skinner/leatherworker and I was kind of surprised by how engaged I've been with crafting so far this expansion. I thought the Dragonflight profession revamp was a bit of a miss, but Blizzard made some changes to the system this time around that, while small, have been pretty impactful. For example they added NPC ("Patron") crafting orders, meaning you can finally interact with the crafting order system even if there are never any public orders up for things that you can actually make. There's also a new button for concentration, which is kind of hilarious to me because I believe this is a mechanic that was already added in Dragonflight, but I just couldn't find it/see how to use it (and I didn't care enough to research it). Now there's suddenly this button and I can press it and it does things! Just goes to show the importance of a good user interface I guess.

All in all, I'm still feeling a bit mixed about evoker though. I healed some dungeons for my friends and had a decent enough time, but... the TWW talent revamp has given me some new buttons to use that I keep forgetting to press because they don't feel particularly fun. Also, with the new expansion and having to gear up again, I feel extremely weak doing anything by myself in the open world right now, which can make even the easiest of world quests feel like utter tedium. The class feels surprisingly squishy for a mail-wearer, my self-healing seems poor in relation to my health pool right now, and my damage output is just absolutely pathetic. I don't expect to do a lot of damage as a healer, but evoker just feels so bad at it right now, and the lack of any AoE that's not on a long cooldown is particularly noticeable. If I pull more than one mob at a time, I always feel like I'm at risk of dying from boredom before actually killing any of my opponents.

Protection Warrior

This is in particularly stark contrast to my Protection Warrior, who is one of my newest alts (levelled during Remix) and was my second character to 80. Like all my alts, she's been levelling without doing the story, just by doing a mix of other activities like dungeons, world events and professions.

This probably won't surprise anyone who's got experience with the current retail game, but as someone with a more "classic" mindset, it still blows my mind that speccing tank is basically the best way to play the game as a casual soloer nowadays. Sure, you'll be slower at killing things than someone specced into dps (though still a lot faster than a healer), but you're also really good at AoE and near-indestructible. Wherever you go, you can just round up everything in sight and then slowly AoE it down at virtually no risk to yourself.

Is there a tough rare in front of you, or a heroic world quest with lots of elites? Never a problem, you just go in anyway. Worst case, you'll be there a long time, taking things down slowly by yourself, but most of the time some damage dealer will come by and be like "oh neat, a pile of controlled mobs that I can put AoE on for kill credit with zero risk to my health", which speeds things up considerably and effectively makes a tank the best class to solo on because you're both decently powerful and never have to wait for help from other people.

There was this one elite world quest I did in Azj-Kahet which granted one of those temporary ability buttons and for some reason it didn't appear in its usual spot but covered my health bar instead, meaning I couldn't see my own health anymore. While I tanked a big group of mobs, now and then the edges of my screen would start flashing red, which is when I knew it was time to hit a cooldown, and soon things were fine again. It just seemed ridiculous how easy it is to get by this way.

I have done some actual tanking as well, even if it was all normal mode dungeons. I tanked the Rookery at least half a dozen times to help get some guildies levelled up for example. This was decent fun and kind of reminded me of when I used to do a fair amount of tanking on my paladin and druid back in Wrath and Cata, even if the gameplay is somewhat different nowadays. Threat is pretty much a non-issue if people aren't being stupid and AoEing things you haven't even touched yet (though they often will do just that), and it's really only about how to best round up groups of mobs efficiently and being able to gauge how much you can pull without killing the rest of your group. Your own survival generally isn't a problem at this level, the more likely issue is that you end up pulling too many mobs with randomly targeted or AoE attacks, causing the damage on the dps and healer to become overwhelming.

For all of that, I'm not 100% sold on tanking as my new calling either. The main downside I see is just the amount of focus it requires. As described above, it's not exactly hard (on the level we are doing it on), but it does require you to be switched on for the entirety of the run in a way that dps and even healing doesn't in easier content. It's something that would probably get better with practice, but I'm still not sure how much time and energy I really want to commit to it.

Oh, and I went down the Colossus hero talent tree, which gives me an extra ability with a medium cooldown that always makes it look like my character is flailing about wildly. Not sure I'd really call that my warrior class fantasy, but I do like the way that hero talent tree is generally about ramping up your damage output over time, making you hit harder and harder as time goes on, as that's something that synergises quite well with a tank's longer kill times.

Holy Priest

My lightforged holy priest is a character I created during Shadowlands and which I've always kept on the back burner since then, never spending too much time on her but also never leaving her too far behind. I still feel a strong affiliation with the class that gave this blog its name, but neither shadow nor discipline appeal to me nowadays. Holy supposedly isn't very good at the moment either, but I have had decent fun healing some alt dungeons with her and playing whack-a-mole with all the different heal buttons.

The thing that has stood out to me with this character is that unlike my evoker, she still feels decent fun to solo on, even as a healer. Now, she's still levelling, so her power levels will continue to go down some more before they go up again, but the dps toolkit just feels more fun than that of the evoker in general. Putting Shadow Word: Pain on every enemy, spreading Holy Fire and popping a Holy Nova whenever it's in its fully empowered state is just entertaining, even if it's not the fastest way to kill things. If I stick with healing, there's a chance I might end up using this character more instead of the evoker.

Holy priest hero talents are again a bit of a dud as far as I'm concerned. Oracle is all about complicated buff management and was what initially made me feel absolutely terrified of hero talents when I heard it being discussed in a podcast prior to the expansion, so I was definitely not going to go for that one. That left me with Archon, which kind of seems to be focused on Halo, an AoE with a long-ish cooldown for a heal and that isn't among my favourites. What can you do?

Frost Death Knight

At some point I felt that I really needed to level a damage dealer just to see what mob kill times are actually supposed to be like for the average player, and I was going back and forth between prioritising this character or my hunter. The death knight eventually won out due to professions, as she's a herbalist/scribe, while the hunter is another skinner/leatherworker.

So this is one of the characters I only revived after the Warband patch and levelled during Radiant Echoes. She lives on my original Horde server and I remember not being overly fond of death knights back in the day, though the class grew on me a little over time and I even recall tanking some dungeons.

I mostly felt inspired to play her in War Within by the fact that her dps rotation seemed incredibly easy, with very few buttons to press (as having too many buttons to press just to do damage is one of my main issues with modern WoW's gameplay).

What did take me by surprise (after my previous experiences with hero talents) was how incredibly fun the Rider of the Apocalypse hero talent tree is. It basically allows you to fight from your ground mount in the open world and passively summons important death knight NPCs to help you out occasionally. I reckon that this is probably not the ideal choice for dungeons, but while just out and about doing world quests it's incredibly fun, even if it feels a bit ridiculous to have Highlord Darion Mograine show up to help you kill a random worm or bear. The mounted speed is also really great for rounding up mobs to AoE or to escape a fight you really can't be bothered with. My husband always complains that lack of mobility is the main thing he dislikes about his death knight, and this talent just counters that in a great way (in the open world at least).

Though one "mobility" issue remains... while questing as a duo with me on my evoker and my husband on his death knight, something that occurred more than once was that we'd fall down/off somewhere and while I'd glide gracefully to a safe landing, he'd go splat next to me and need a revive. I always made fun of him for that, but playing my own death knight, I quickly learned that it's basically a vibe for this class. As mentioned before, mine is also a herbalist, so it didn't take long for me to "discover" that those special flowers that knock you back and whose knockback can't be countered made their way over from the Dragon Isles - which is my way of saying that my first two deaths in Khaz Algar were both to being punted to my death by a herb while picking flowers on the Isle of Dorn. I guess you get used to it as a death knight.

Finally, I had a fun encounter on this character while questing one night: As mentioned, she's on my old Horde server, and I tend to forget that for all the cross-server stuff, if you're just out and about, you're still more likely to see people from the same server as you than complete randoms. So my eyes went wide when I actually ran into a troll priest whose name I recognised from fifteen years ago or however long it's been. I whispered him with something like "Nice to still see familiar faces around when coming back after a long absence!" to which his response was simply "That's just a polite way of saying we're getting old", which made me laugh.